Children of the Land

I didn't feel like posting about the last couple of books I finished (From the Ashes, Hand to Mouth, How Proust Can Change Your Life), although it was not because they weren't impactful. It's because there weren't singular items that stood out, and I haven't given enough thought to form overall impressions (not that I explicitly undergo this exercise for other books either).

But here is a long quotation from Children of the Land that stood out. For context, the book is a memoire about the authors' experience being an undocumented immigrant. 

Going to La Loma was the only way I would unravel and return to the world of the living. It happened when I was young. I wandered in the woods of the Sierra Nevada in the warmth of the summer, when the small mountain flowers and mule's ear sprouts were lush, I tried to open. I yellow and yellowed and sang and chanted, but even the warm breeze felt like knives to an exposed nerve. And a few years later, I came close to that disentanglement again, but again there was nothing for me to hold on to, nothing of substance to replay the centre, so I buckled up and tried to drive my car into the river. I didn't want to come back. And once this feeling of emptiness at my core started, it wouldn't go away. It was too late and it felt like I was becoming smaller day by day, unthreading, I could feel how much of myself I left behind everywhere I went. I was almost reeling in it because I felt it as a kind of ecstasy - parts of myself scattered over an entire landscape. A little of me here, a little of there. My anxiety no longer mattered, my sadness, my invisibility, and my hopelessness felt foreign to me, which is to say, they were inconsequential. I withdrew and let the world move my body without me, I tumbled like dried grass. I didn't have anything like La Loma, with its thick walls built by my ancestors, to bring me back to reality. No semblance of permanence. 

I felt most of the writing, and the quotation above especially, has a poetic quality to it. The author is a poet, so that's some basis for my vague feeling as it'd be hard for me to describe what exactly is poetry (and not that I read any). 

If I were to make some generalizations about all of the quotations that I've noted down in my blog, the commonality in style would be this vague poetic quality and the commonality in theme would be...lacking in substance?